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Library and information science (LIS)[1][2] are two academic disciplines that study all aspects of the creation, organization, documentation, management, communication, and use of recorded information. It underlies a variety of professional activities such asinformation management, librarianship, andarchiving andrecords management, educating professionals for work in those areas, and carrying out research to improve practice.[3][4][5]
Library science andinformation science are two original disciplines; however, they are within the same field of study.[6][7] Library science is applied information science,[8] as well as a subfield of information science. Due to the strong connection, sometimes the two terms are used synonymously.
Library science (previously termedlibrary studies andlibrary economy)[note 1] is aninterdisciplinary or multidisciplinary field that applies the practices, perspectives, and tools ofmanagement,information technology,education, and other areas tolibraries; the collection, organization,preservation, anddissemination of information resources; and thepolitical economy of information.[citation needed] MartinSchrettinger, a Bavarianlibrarian, coined the discipline within his work (1808–1828)Versuch eines vollständigen Lehrbuchs der Bibliothek-Wissenschaft oder Anleitung zur vollkommenen Geschäftsführung eines Bibliothekars.[9] Rather than classifying information based on nature-oriented elements, as was previously done in his Bavarian library, Schrettinger organized books in alphabetical order.[10] The first American school for library science was founded byMelvil Dewey atColumbia University in 1887.[11]
Historically, library science has also includedarchival science.[12] This includes: how information resources are organized to serve the needs of selected user groups; how people interact with classification systems and technology; how information is acquired, evaluated and applied by people in and outside libraries as well as cross-culturally; how people are trained and educated for careers in libraries; theethics that guide library service and organization; the legal status oflibraries and information resources; and the applied science of computer technology used in documentation andrecords management.
LIS should not be confused withinformation theory, the mathematical study of the concept of information.Library philosophy has been contrasted withlibrary science as the study of the aims and justifications of librarianship as opposed to the development and refinement of techniques.[13]
Academic courses in library science includecollection management, information systems and technology, research methods, user studies,information literacy,cataloging andclassification,preservation,reference,statistics andmanagement. Library science is constantly evolving, incorporating new topics likedatabase management,information architecture andinformation management, among others.
With the mounting acceptance of Wikipedia as a valued and reliable reference source, many libraries, museums, and archives have introduced the role ofWikipedian in residence. As a result, some universities are including coursework relating to Wikipedia and Knowledge Management in their MLIS programs.
Becoming a library staff member does not always need a degree, and in some contexts the difference between being a library staff member and a librarian is the level of education.[14][15] Most professional library jobs require a professional degree in library science or equivalent. In the United States andCanada the certification usually comes from a master's degree granted by anALA-accredited institution.[16] In Australia, a number of institutions offer degrees accepted by theALIA (Australian Library and Information Association).[17] Global standards of accreditation or certification in librarianship have yet to be developed.[18]
The Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) is the master's degree that is required for most professional librarian positions in the United States and Canada. The MLIS was created after the older Master of Library Science (MLS) was reformed to reflect the information science and technology needs of the field. According to the American Library Association (ALA), "ALA-accredited degrees have [had] various names such as Master of Arts, Master of Librarianship, Master of Library and Information Studies, or Master of Science.[19] The degree name is determined by the program. The [ALA] Committee for Accreditation evaluates programs based on their adherence to the Standards for Accreditation of Master's Programs in Library and Information Studies, not based on the name of the degree."[20]
The study of librarianship forpublic libraries covers issues such as cataloging;collection development for a diverse community;information literacy;readers' advisory; community standards; public services-focused librarianship via community-centered programming; serving a diverse community of adults, children, and teens;intellectual freedom;censorship; and legal and budgeting issues. The public library as a commons or public sphere based on the work ofJürgen Habermas has become a central metaphor in the 21st century.[21]
In the United States there are four different types of public libraries:association libraries, municipal public libraries, school district libraries, and special district public libraries. Each receives funding through different sources, each is established by a different set of voters, and not all are subject to municipal civil service governance.[22]
The study ofschool librarianship covers library services for children in nursery, primary through secondary school. In some regions, the local government may have stricter standards for the education and certification ofschool librarians (who are sometimes considered a special case of teacher), than for other librarians, and the educational program will include those local criteria. School librarianship may also include issues ofintellectual freedom,pedagogy,information literacy, and how to build a cooperativecurriculum with the teaching staff.
The study ofacademic librarianship covers library services for colleges and universities. Issues of special importance to the field may includecopyright; technology;digital libraries and digital repositories;academic freedom;open access to scholarly works; and specialized knowledge of subject areas important to the institution and the relevantreference works. Librarians often divide focus individually as liaisons on particular schools within a college or university. Academic librarians may besubject specific librarians.
Some academic librarians are consideredfaculty, and hold similar academic ranks to those of professors, while others are not. In either case, the minimal qualification is a Master of Arts in Library Studies or a Master of Arts in Library Science. Some academic libraries may only require a master's degree in a specific academic field or a related field, such as educational technology.
The study of archives includes the training ofarchivists, librarians specially trained to maintain and buildarchives ofrecords intended forhistorical preservation. Special issues include physical preservation, conservation, and restoration of materials andmass deacidification; specialist catalogs; solo work; access; and appraisal. Many archivists are also trained historians specializing in the period covered by the archive. There have been attempts to revive the concept ofdocumentation and to speak ofLibrary, information and documentation studies (or science).[23]
The archival mission includes three major goals: To identify papers and records with enduring value, preserve the identified papers, and make the papers available to others.[24] While libraries receive items individually, archival items will usually become part of the archive's collection as a cohesive group.[24] Major difference in collections is that library collections typically comprise published items (books, magazines, etc.), while archival collections are usually unpublished works (letters, diaries, etc.). Library collections are created by many individuals, as each author and illustrator create their own publication; in contrast, an archive usually collects the records of one person, family, institution, or organization, so the archival items will have fewer sources of authors.[24]
Behavior in an archive differs from behavior in other libraries. In most libraries, items are openly available to the public. Archival items almost never circulate, and someone interested in viewing documents must request them of the archivist and may only be able view them in a closed reading room.[24]
Special libraries are libraries established to meet the highly specialized requirements of professional or business groups. A library is special depending on whether it covers a specialized collection, a special subject, or a particular group of users, or even the type of parent organization, such asmedical libraries orlaw libraries.
The issues at these libraries are specific to their industries but may include solo work, corporate financing, specialized collection development, and extensive self-promotion to potential patrons. Special librarians have their own professional organization, theSpecial Libraries Association (SLA).
Some special libraries, such as theCIA Library, may contain classified works. It is a resource to employees of theCentral Intelligence Agency, containing over 125,000 written materials, subscribes to around 1,700 periodicals, and had collections in three areas: Historical Intelligence, Circulating, and Reference.[25] In February 1997, three librarians working at the institution spoke toInformation Outlook, a publication of the SLA, revealing that the library had been created in 1947, the importance of the library in disseminating information to employees, even with a small staff, and how the library organizes its materials.[26]
Preservation librarians most often work in academic libraries. Their focus is on the management of preservation activities that seek to maintain access to content within books, manuscripts, archival materials, and other library resources. Examples of activities managed by preservation librarians include binding, conservation, digital and analog reformatting,digital preservation, and environmental monitoring.
Libraries have existed for many centuries but library science is a more recent phenomenon, as early libraries were managed primarily by academics.[27]
The earliest text on "library operations",Advice on Establishing a Library was published in 1627 by French librarian and scholarGabriel Naudé. Naudé wrote on many subjects including politics, religion, history, and the supernatural. He put into practice all the ideas put forth inAdvice when given the opportunity to build and maintain the library ofCardinal Jules Mazarin.[28]
During the'golden age of libraries' in the 17th century, publishers and sellers seeking to take advantage of the burgeoning book trade developed descriptive catalogs of their wares for distribution – a practice was adopted and further extrapolated by many libraries of the time to cover areas like philosophy, sciences, linguistics, and medicine[29]
In 1726Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz wroteIdea of Arranging a Narrower Library.[30]
Martin Schrettinger wrote the second textbook (the first in Germany) on the subject from 1808 to 1829.
Some of the main tools used by LIS to provide access to the resources originated in 19th century to make information accessible by recording, identifying, and providing bibliographic control of printed knowledge.[31] The origin for some of these tools were even earlier.
Thomas Jefferson, whose library atMonticello consisted of thousands of books, devised a classification system inspired by theBaconian method, which grouped books more or less by subject rather than alphabetically, as it was previously done.[32] The Jefferson collection provided the basis of what became theLibrary of Congress after the first collection was destroyed in the 1814Burning of Washington.
The first American school of librarianship opened in New York under the leadership ofMelvil Dewey, noted for his1876 decimal classification, on January 5, 1887, as theColumbia College School of Library Economy. The termlibrary economy was common in the U.S. until 1942, with the term,library science, predominant through much of the 20th century.[33]
In the English-speaking world the term "library science" seems to have been used for the first time in India[34] in the 1916 bookPunjab Library Primer, written by Asa Don Dickinson and published by theUniversity of Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan.[35] This university was the first in Asia to begin teaching "library science". ThePunjab Library Primer was the first textbook on library science published in English anywhere in the world. The first textbook in the United States was theManual of Library Economy byJames Duff Brown, published in 1903.
Later, the term was used in the title ofS. R. Ranganathan'sThe Five Laws of Library Science, published in 1931, which contains Ranganathan'stitular theory. Ranganathan is also credited with the development of the first major analytical-synthetic classification system, thecolon classification.[36]
In the United States, Lee Pierce Butler published his 1933 bookAn Introduction to Library Science (University of Chicago Press), where he advocated for research usingquantitative methods and ideas in thesocial sciences with the aim of using librarianship to address society's information needs. He was one of the first faculty at theUniversity of Chicago Graduate Library School, which changed the structure and focus of education for librarianship in the twentieth century. This research agenda went against the more procedure-based approach of the "library economy", which was mostly confined to practical problems in the administration of libraries.
In 1923,Charles C. Williamson, who was appointed by the Carnegie Corporation, published an assessment of library science education entitled "The Williamson Report", which designated that universities should provide library science training.[37] This report had a significant impact on library science training and education. Library research and practical work, in the area of information science, have remained largely distinct both in training and in research interests.
William Stetson Merrill'sA Code for Classifiers, released in several editions from 1914 to 1939,[38] is an example of a more pragmatic approach, where arguments stemming from in-depth knowledge about each field of study are employed to recommend a system of classification. While Ranganathan's approach was philosophical, it was also tied more to the day-to-day business of running a library. A reworking of Ranganathan's laws was published in 1995 which removes the constant references to books.Michael Gorman'sOur Enduring Values: Librarianship in the 21st Century features the eight principles necessary by library professionals and incorporates knowledge and information in all their forms, allowing for digital information to be considered.
By the late 1960s, mainly due to the meteoric rise of human computing power and the new academic disciplines formed therefrom, academic institutions began to add the term "information science" to their names. The first school to do this was at theUniversity of Pittsburgh in 1964.[39] More schools followed during the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s almost all library schools in the US had added information science to their names. Although there are exceptions, similar developments have taken place in other parts of the world. InIndia, the Department of Library Science,University of Madras (southern state ofTamil Nadu, India) became the Department of Library and Information Science in 1976. InDenmark, for example, the "Royal School of Librarianship" changed its English name toThe Royal School of Library and Information Science in 1997.
Thedigital age has transformed how information is accessed andretrieved. "The library is now a part of a complex and dynamic educational, recreational, and informational infrastructure."[37]Mobile devices and applications withwireless networking, high-speed computers and networks, and thecomputing cloud have deeply impacted and developed information science and information services. The evolution of the library sciences maintains its mission of access equity and community space, as well as the new means for information retrieval called information literacy skills. All catalogs,databases, and a growing number of books are available on theInternet. In addition, the expanding free access toopen access journals and sources such asWikipedia has fundamentally impacted how information is accessed.
Information literacy is the ability to "determine the extent of information needed, access the needed information effectively and efficiently, evaluate information and its sources critically, incorporate selected information into one's knowledge base, use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose, and understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information, and access and use information ethically and legally."[40]In recent years,[vague] the concept ofdata literacy has emerged within library and information science as a complement to information literacy to refer to the ability to find, interpret, evaluate, manage, and ethically use data to support research, learning, and informed decision-making.[41]
In the early 2000s, dLIST, Digital Library for Information Sciences and Technology was established. It was the firstopen access archive for the multidisciplinary 'library and information sciences' building a global scholarly communication consortium and the LIS Commons in order to increase the visibility of research literature, bridge the divide between practice, teaching, and research communities, and improve visibility, uncitedness, and integrate scholarly work in the critical information infrastructures of archives, libraries, and museums.[42][43][44][45]
Social justice, an important ethical value in librarianship and in the 21st century has become an important research area, if not subdiscipline of LIS.[46]
Some core journals in LIS are:
Important bibliographical databases in LIS are, among others,Social Sciences Citation Index andLibrary and Information Science Abstracts[48]
This is a list of some of the major conferences in the field.
| Information science |
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| General aspects |
| Related fields and subfields |
Information science grew out ofdocumentation science[51] and therefore has a tradition for considering scientific and scholarly communication,bibliographic databases, subject knowledge and terminology etc.
An advertisement for a full Professor in information science at the Royal School of Library and Information Science, spring 2011, provides one view of which sub-disciplines are well-established:[52] "The research and teaching/supervision must be within some (and at least one) of these well-established information science areas
A curriculum study by Kajberg & Lørring in 2005[53] reported a "degree of overlap of the ten curricular themes with subject areas in the current curricula of responding LIS schools".
There is often an overlap between these subfields of LIS and other fields of study. Most information retrieval research, for example, belongs to computer science. Knowledge management is considered a subfield of management or organizational studies.[54]
Pre-Internet classification systems andcataloging systems were mainly concerned with two objectives:
The development of the Internet and the information explosion that followed found many communities needing mechanisms for the description, authentication and management of their information.[55] These communities developed taxonomies andcontrolled vocabularies to describe their knowledge, as well as unique information architectures to communicate these classifications and libraries found themselves as liaison or translator between these metadata systems.[55] The concerns of cataloging in the Internet era have gone beyond simple bibliographic descriptions and the need for descriptive information about the ownership and copyright of a digital product – a publishing concern – and description for the different formats and accessibility features of a resource – a sociological concern – show the continued development and cross discipline necessity of resource description.[55]
In the 21st century, the usage ofopen data,open source andopen protocols likeOAI-PMH has allowed thousands of libraries and institutions to collaborate on the production of global metadata services previously offered only by increasingly expensive commercial proprietary products. Tools likeBASE andUnpaywall automate the search of anacademic paper across thousands of repositories by libraries and research institutions.[56]
Library science is very closely related to issues of knowledge organization; however, the latter is a broader term that covers how knowledge is represented and stored (computer science/linguistics), how it might be automatically processed (artificial intelligence), and how it is organized outside the library in global systems such as the internet. In addition, library science typically refers to a specific community engaged in managing holdings as they are found in university and government libraries, while knowledge organization, in general, refers to this and also to other communities (such as publishers) and other systems (such as the Internet). The library system is thus one socio-technical structure for knowledge organization.[citation needed]
The terms 'information organization' and 'knowledge organization' are often used synonymously.[31]: 106 The fundamentals of their study - particularly theory relating to indexing and classification - and many of the main tools used by the disciplines in modern times to provide access to digital resources such as abstracting, metadata, resource description, systematic and alphabetic subject description, and terminology, originated in the 19th century and were developed, in part, to assist in making humanity's intellectual output accessible by recording, identifying, and providing bibliographic control of printed knowledge.[31]: 105
Information has been published that analyses the relations between the philosophy of information (PI), library and information science (LIS), and social epistemology (SE).[57]
Practicing library professionals and members of theAmerican Library Association recognize and abide by the ALA Code of Ethics. According to the American Library Association, "In a political system grounded in an informed citizenry, we are members of a profession explicitly committed to intellectual freedom and freedom of access to information. We have a special obligation to ensure the free flow of information and ideas to present and future generations."[58] The ALA Code of Ethics was adopted in the winter of 1939, and updated on June 29, 2021.[58]
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| Dewey Decimal | 020 |
| Library of Congress | Z664.2-Z718.85  |
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